Ad Nauseum - Quareness Series 112th "Lecture".
It often seems nowadays that our modern ethos of excessive materialism doesn't really respect or understand the life that resides in all things...a condition our consumerist culture could be caught up in ad nauseum. We might be fast approaching the time where we're in danger of completely overlooking the vital importance for humanity to refocus on gaining perspective regarding the need for us to respect this all-pervading life force. Even should our planet get completely out of balance, it will more than likely recover one way or another but the Earth's healing process may not include us if we do not choose to live more consciously.
It's not part of my intent here "to debate" the impact of our socalled man-made global warming, which for me is to date an unproven hypothesis, but rather to focus on a much more fundamental aspect of our lifestyle...how we regard/view our food sources.
Many of us seem to feel that we need a rigid moral framework when considering the problem of "food ethics" so that we can see ourselves as good people. However, maybe we need instead to accept the fact that life feeds on life and in doing so to acknowledge the land healing process involved through adopting regenerative practices and cultivating a spirit of respect by acknowledging the life energy that resides in everything that we eat. There's a life energy in everything we consume including for example from the trees that we use for firewood to the oils we use to fuel our cars...
both being the accumulated energy of ancient sunlight captured by perennial plants. And perhaps the least harmful foods for us to eat come from perennial plants and the animals that eat those perennial plants.
Veganism and vegetarianism (potentially laudable ideas in some respects) can for some provide a framework for moral superiority. And cultivating a savior complex is a natural result of following any ideological cause when life is seen through a frame that excludes anything not fitting its limited ideology. But our reality is that in order to live our daily lives, we all must endlessly consume life energy. If the primary goal of say vegetarianism is to reduce suffering, then maybe a diet composed of mostly grass-fed beef and dairy, as well as free-range eggs and perennial plant products, is a better option. Such can be a diet based on grass that's never tilled with no creatures (e.g. worms, etc.) disturbed or injured and which allows nature to grow and flourish without our annual agricultural blade and chemical interference.
In earlier times farmers knew that to keep the land healthy and productive, they needed to let their fields go fallow. Nowadays this idea seems largely anathema, given our modern tendency towards regarding any wild and free land as worthless. We generally appear to feel that all things should at all times be as productive as possible...thereby exhausting ourselves, the land, the wildlife, our seas and even our air. In the circumstances we need a renewed understanding that when allowed "to rest" the land itself bursts forth with wild life and energy beyond what is possible with an annual agriculture. Life stories of a million creatures play out contributing to the regeneration of a piece of fallow land...a wild acre...a small part of planet Earth. This is the type of beneficial reward awaiting us when we stop over-exploiting the natural resources of the world (land, air, sea, etc.) for our endless hungers. In a fallow state we can all begin to regenerate.
It can seem that many people on the planet don't really understand what it takes to grow our food. In urban centres across the globe people make a thousand choices trying to do the best they can with the panoply of annual agriculture products available, whilst at the same time thinking little of the variety of perennial based whole foods on our supermarket shelves.
Our modern practice of "mass" agriculture makes it nigh impossible to refrain from causing endless suffering to many living creatures. In such cultivation of crops (including beans, grains, rice, vegetables, etc.) that only take one year to grow from seed to food, we displace countless wild animals from their homes and landscapes and indeed kill many of them when tilling and harvesting. On the other hand, a perennial agriculture based on trees, shrubs, grasses and livestock allows nature to thrive without annual destruction of such an extent. It may now be wiser for us to value these longer term advantages over those provided by more short term yearly abundances.
Will we do so?...perhaps...but the short-sightedness of mankind can be limitless.
Of course this heavy use of arable land can provide ample food for humanity, but at what cost to so many other animals with which we share this Earth? All of this annual agriculture we promote inevitably provides for the ongoing extermination of numerous other creatures on a yearly basis and we have to wonder whether a pound of grass-fed beef accounts for less suffering per capita than a pound of corn. In truth we all get to leave a trail of devastation as we go through each day, because all life consumes life in order to thrive...
this is the natural way of things?
We can reduce suffering on the planet by consciously cultivating a relationship with the land, the people who live on the land, and the animals and plants we consume. And in doing so we can avoid inadvertently supporting some of what harms our environment, degrading soils and water supplies while we still go on killing lots of life. This stands in stark contrast with the type of farming that can actually improve our environment and ecosystems e.g. raising pasture-fed animals in a regenerative agriculural fashion.
In this time of contentious issues surrounding questions of climate change, "greenhouse gas" emissions and environmental mess allegedly driven to some degree by large scale industrial meat processing and factory type
farming, methinks we'd be well advised not to overlook that there are good options for meats raised in a humane, healthy and environmentally-friendly manner, eating the most nutritious foods for their species. It seems rather
important to make such distinctions so as to avoid an overly narrow perspective kneejerk approach to say culling Ireland's national cattle herd.
Maybe what is of far greater importance for humanity today is to focus on gaining a deeper perspective on the larger, overarching issue of our ongoing failure to truly respect the life force in all things?
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
December, 2019.